Chapter The Lilies Wretched #3
Then, as Mallory withdraws, an elbow slams into Aster’s neck.
Her cheek is pressed to the tile, and her arms are wrenched behind her.
She cries out, twisting to see the Tender Guard rush up the stairs, clumping at the landing while Mallory flees across the catwalks.
He is fast, leaping from beam to platform as if he had climbed in such precarity all his life.
A few Guardsmen rush after him. One panics, cranks his cannula, and swallows the upper levels in fumigants, while a few more pull Florian limply back down the stairs.
Something cold scrapes at the emeralds embedded in Aster’s wrist, a knee presses the wind from her.
Then, another shot rings out, too close, too sudden, and the Guardsman is gone.
Aster’s head spins, her ears pulse with pressure, and she shakes as she is jerked to her feet.
Long nails dig into her forearm, shoving her toward the rear of the venue.
“El,” Aster gasps, “did you—”
“Can’t blame a blind girl for friendly fire,” she says, breathless excitement in her voice. “Bathroom, dear. Go. I’ll talk to them. They’re not going to shoot the Chancellor’s wife. Especially not if she’s crying.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Second stall to the right, behind the cistern. Don’t wait for me.”
Aster blinks. She turns, compelled by an order too insane to be questioned.
She struggles through the haze, past the cinder blocks and coffins and debris, and dives into the lavatory.
She shuts the door, gathering herself as fumigants seep in from fissures and broken windows.
She doesn’t crawl behind the cistern, but paces between the stalls, shaking with guilt.
She circles the bathroom a few times, steeling herself to jump back into the chaos.
She musters her courage, makes for the door, and shrieks when a shadow materializes from a fissure over a urinal.
It’s only Mallory, shimmying through the crack as easily as any worm.
“Florian—” Aster starts. “Did you kill—”
“I did. And he didn’t make it easy.” He dangles from the fissure, then drops down.
“Timing could’ve been better, but you do what you can.
Come on. Before my third-eye wears off.” He extends his hand, a sinister light dancing in his gaze.
The gash in his forehead bleeds in wild rivulets, down his nose, up into his hair.
“Unless you want to stick around and see how the Marshal takes the news.”
“I have to. I have to help Elspeth.”
“She knows what she’s doing. Never met a better improviser.”
“She’ll need me. The Marshal—he won’t hurt me. I’ll be fine.”
He gives her a knowing frown, hand still extended. A thread of blood crawls up his finger, against gravity. The wail of a siren shakes the walls.
“He won’t hurt me,” she repeats. “I’m … I’m a daughter to him.”
Finally, Mallory’s gaze softens. He takes her hand. “So was I,” he says. “But that didn’t save me.”
The hours crawl by, but at a startlingly fast crawl.
Guy waits, hurries, then waits again. He rushes to escort a reporter from the Arbuscle to Bertram’s office, then twiddles his thumbs as their conversation unfolds behind a closed door.
He runs down to the kitchen to watch the water boil. He blinks once, and half a day passes.
Bertram leaves and returns and leaves, grappling with lawyers and contractors and media men.
Word of the siege of Borisch-Gorslung percolates across town, and most of Bertram’s time is spent pruning its spread.
Hardly a day passes before the vultures begin to circle, hungry for rumors of the new company’s fumigants, patents, armaments.
Wherewithal, Inc., is the first to send a representative. Placid Sewage Treatment Company comes next, offering decontamination supplies at gouged prices; Fairsire Armaments offers a small, conditional slice of its soldiery. Even the Grand Marshal Exultant sends an operative to assess the goings-on.
“Parasites,” Bertram sighs, shoving the last contractor from his office.
“Soot mites, bloodsuckers.” He collapses in his chair and plonks his feet on the desk.
“No forethought. No vision. They’d let Tiliard wilt like the rest of the world, if they could make a buck off it.
” He undoes his tie and leans back, pulling his hat over his face.
“Shit, I’m beat. Recite me something. Ye bard of Borisch-Gorslung. ”
Guy does. He sings a passage from Birth of the Deathbed, a soft arietta, and it takes half a minute for Bertram to fall asleep.
Guy watches him snore, then pours himself a glass of water.
Next to the crystal decanter lies a preliminary hundredth edition of the Manual.
As soon as he cracks open the spine, breathing in the scent of leather and binding sap, Tyro materializes beside him.
“Where’s Three?” she asks quietly. “Is she back yet?”
“Sit with me,” he whispers. He glances to his boss, then flips to the back of the book. “I got a story stuck in my ear.”
“She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“Sit down,” he says. The latest entry is the Contaminated Srecktman, a hideous, dripping illustration with pristine white margins. “It’s a new one. This one is about a man who falls into the Catoptric. Sit.”
She considers him, unimpressed. “That’s not a new one.”
“Yes it is.”
“I’ve heard that one before. He falls into the river and dies at the end.”
“No, grub. He dies at the beginning.”
This piques her interest. Finally, she sits.
“He’s a gentleman scholar. An alchemist, who sails to the edge of the dead world to find the source of the Catoptric.”
“There is no source,” Tyro says.
“That’s what we think. But he thinks differently.
The first act opens with him at a writing desk in his cabin.
He’s finishing his grand treatise, and he sings excerpts to the audience—about how he’s almost unlocked the secrets of the river, where it came from, what it’s really made of.
He’s so, so very close—” He pauses, and a bizarre melody sears through his ear.
“He’s on the verge of finishing his final thought when the ship’s raided. ”
“Of course,” Tyro mutters. “Pirates.”
“Physicists, actually. Rivals from the University. They steal his research and sink his ship. The whole crew dies in the first scene.”
“Then what’s the rest of it about?”
“Well, they sail away with his manuscript, and the alchemist wakes up at the bottom of the river. It’s a bizarre place—no fish, no plant life, just millions of tiny, dancing lights. The kind you can see on the surface at night during Hound Moon. ‘Smithereens of God,’ like Montresor says.”
“Who?”
“Doesn’t matter. What does is that there’ll be this amazing lighting apparatus, with lots of mirrors on strings.
” He closes his eyes, and the stage expands before him, an iridescent mist of silver punctuated by fluttering jewels, bright as the toxin that flooded Sreckt headquarters.
“And our hero follows them like a navigator follows the stars. He meets a few lost souls along the way. An old man’s ghost. A lord’s sight hound that fell off his yacht. The dog gets her own number.”
“Stupid.”
“Shut it, Ty. It’ll be good. Anyway, he walks along the riverbed, because he can do nothing else.
He can’t climb up the banks, because they’re smooth as glass.
He can’t flag down passing boats, because the surface is too reflective.
He just walks and walks, until he gets to an anchor.
It’s the physicists’ ship—and you know what he finds there, right beside it? ”
“The source of the Catoptric,” Ty says.
“That’s right. It’s not very impressive. Just a crack in the ground. But when he presses his face up against it and looks inside, he understands.”
“Understands what?”
“The source is a process, not a place. An experiment started thousands of years ago, by our ancestors. It’s unlike anything he’s ever seen before—or even thought about before. It’s so complex and ancient that it almost defies comprehension.”
“And the knowledge drives him insane,” says Ty hopefully. “And then it ends.”
“No, then it’s intermission. When we get back, we’re with the rival crew.
They get their own songs and dances—I’ll show you those later.
The captain stays in his cabin, trying to decipher the manuscript.
It doesn’t make any sense to him. He tortures himself trying to figure it out—tortures the whole crew.
The last bit of the last paragraph is still missing, the equation that ties everything together.
One night, he’s out on the deck and hears the anchor chain rattle.
He thinks it’s a river monster, but when he leans over the side to look, he sees a man climbing up it.
He’s scared shitless—it’s the alchemist, still wearing the same suit he died in.
He steps onto the deck and tells him he’s finished his manuscript.
The captain is paralyzed. He just stands there while the alchemist whispers into his ear, telling him the last equation of his treatise.
The audience doesn’t get to hear it—for their safety, of course, because what the physicist hears strikes such awe into his heart, it stops altogether.
The laws of the universe slide into place so smoothly, so instantly, his mind can’t keep up.
He is so taken by the beauty of it all, he can’t do anything but stagger around the stage, singing his final, bizarre, wonderful aria, and then…
” Guy pauses to think. “He’s sent down the chute to hell. ”
“That’s dumb,” Tyro says.
“It’s not finished.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Most people won’t. At least when it first comes out. But it’ll gain traction. Ten years, it’ll be a classic. A hundred, scientific fact. I’m calling it A Gentleman of the Void.”